There were some really interesting papers, including presentations by postgraduates and early career researchers in architectural history, discussing buildings such as health centres, schools, housing and theatres, as well as the discursive environments surrounding them, from the architectural press to RIBA.

Focusing on the half-century between the 1920s and the 1970s the conference set the scene for social and architectural developments in post-war Britain by looking at their roots in the interwar period. For example, Elizabeth Darling discussed the interwar Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, which was regarded as not just a health centre offering advice such as birth control but a social space and centre for the community which would bring people in. She set out one of the key themes of the conference not addressed in the title – education – showing how the centre was part of a wider aim to give people information and education, in order to better themselves.

Jessica Kelly followed this by showing how the architectural press of the 1930s and 1940s navigated between public taste and architects, who as experts and specialists had both privileges and responsibilities. The attitudes of writers in publications such as the Architects Journal and the Architectural Review moved, she explained, from condemnation of public tastes in the 1930s towards a more collaborative approach. This led to a really interesting discussion among the panel and the audience about consumerism, citizenship and class, and the idea that upper and middle-class architects and built environments could play a part in helping working-class people obtain citizenship. Another theme that began to emerge was suburban versus urban life – urban living was promoted as a route to citizenship at a time when the majority of people would have lived suburban lives.

The session on educational spaces was a particular highlight of the conference. Roy Kozlovsky explored the emotional history of school buildings, drawing a link between the family and the home in the post-war period and exploring the complex link between the home and the school, arguing that emotional performances became symbolic landscapes of reconstruction.

I particularly enjoyed Catherine Buke (previously of the Decorated School)’s presentation, which referenced innovations in school building in the United States, Italy and the UK. Cathy drew a distinction between designing for learning versus designing for living, and described how post-war schools aimed to promote learning for living and help their students live in the modern world. She drew links between the school system and the strengthening of democracy and resistance against Fascism at a time when, as she said, ‘a common vocabulary was forged between architecture and education’. I was really interested to hear about Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia infant school in northern Italy, which Cathy described as a democratic project aiming to teach its students how to be critical, ask questions and be active in their environments. Cathy also referenced a number of important UK educationalists, including Cambridgeshire Director of Education Henry Morris, with his ideas of using schools to bring art and culture to working-class and rural populations, and Alec Clegg of the West Riding. Through these figures and others Cathy explored the idea that the educational environment is a kind of ‘third teacher’ after the parent and the teacher, and the belief that children should be able to shape their own environments. She showed both buildings and furnishings as an example of the way in which furniture and crockery was desired to be not just functional but beautiful, as part of a consideration of what should be brought inside a school building, and therefore play a part in developing children’s taste.

Another highlight was Louise Campbell’s discussion of post-war educational expansion and the need for universities. She positioned access to university as a right, which had been fought for during the war, and argued that the development of new universities was part of an idealisation of the young. Focusing on the University of Sussex, she explored post-war universities’ aspirations to produce cultivated young people, to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood and to introduce students to high culture (in contrast to Brighton youth and gang culture), at the same time as breaking down traditional subject divisions. She described both how the nature of the welfare state was reflected in buildings, and the ways in which the campus absorbed European influences in its style and appearance.

Otto Saumarez Smith explored the links between the welfare state, modernism and sociology, which had its roots in the inter-war years, and the legacy of this in social democratic approaches in the 1970s. He made an interesting point about the ways in which new towns could be associated with acquisitiveness, affluence and ultimately a move towards conservatism among their inhabitants. Christine Hui-Lan Manley spoke about the picturesque principles underlying the design of Harlow.

A highlight of the conference was Alistair Fair on the development of post-war theatres. He explained that prior to 1939 theatre rarely received public funding, but after the Second World war new theatres were built across the country, often as part of civic centres, and enjoyed public subsidy. The period saw a move away from commercial theatre companies to theatre taking on a more civic function and being regarded as a public amenity, in which the public were encouraged to participate. Alistair contextualised this with reference to political developments, from the 1959 Labour manifesto ‘Leisure for Living’ to Conservative promotion of leisure as giving a sense of purpose and alleviating boredom. He explained that the Arts Council placed culture as part of the welfare state and the development of a ‘gayer and more cultivated population’, where modern citizens enjoyed culture and leisure and culture was balanced against ‘materialist impulses’. This was partly driven by motivations of egalitarianism but also partly, he said, a reaction against American culture and search for appropriate kinds of leisure as people became more affluent. Another interesting link was with suburban growth, which often lacked facilities – collective leisure pursuits could be seen as one way to counter individualist suburban drift.

It was also great to hear about Rosamund West’s research about the London County Council’s patronage of art for residential estates. Rosamund discussed the City of London plan as a discursive event, which was distributed to residents for information and education. She showed some of the types of artworks that were chosen for new estates – themes included neighbours – and some of the ways in which artworks were chosen and received, including the input of residents’ committees in the early years. Interestingly, she highlighted a tension between the Arts Council, which preferred that big names were commissioned, and the LCC, which championed new talent such as students and teachers.

After a day and a half of presentations and discussions which often came back to ideas about taste and the public, Lesley Whitworth’s presentation about the Council of Industrial Design, which developed an index of ‘well-designed’ goods certified with a label, was a fitting way to round off a conference, which took architecture as its starting point but moved beyond that to consider not just space and communities but objects and culture in a broad sense.

Last week I spent a day and a half browsing Nan Youngman’s papers in the special collections at the University of Reading. Nan Youngman was the founder of Pictures for Schools and, as an artist and art teacher, she was heavily involved in both the Artists International Association and then the Society for Education in Art (SEA). The collection (or at least the parts I saw, which wasn’t a huge proportion of it) was concerned mainly with the history, development and documentation of Pictures for Schools over its two decades-plus existence through correspondence, scripts, exhibition catalogues, photographs and press cuttings. I had been unsure of the date when Pictures for Schools finished, although I had suspected 1969 as I hadn’t seen any references to it in archive/gallery collections after that year, and correspondence between Youngman and the president of SEA revealed that, although 1969’s exhibition was the most successful yet, Pictures for Schools was forced to draw to a close due to the difficulty of finding a venue — the Royal Academy, where the exhibition was held in preceding years, massively increased its charges for hiring rooms, a lack of financial commitment from the Arts Council, who had previously guaranteed the exhibitions against loss, and increasing financial pressures on schools at the time.

I started with an oversize scrapbook entitled ‘Nan Youngman’s Pictures for Schools file’, which contained exhibition catalogues and several pages of press cuttings per show documenting thePictures for Schools exhibitions which took place between 1947 and 1966. This gave me a really good sense of the public profile of Pictures for Schools: it appears to have received considerable press coverage, not just in specialist arts, culture and education publications, but in the national press, publications related to specific sections of society such as the Daily Worker and Jewish and Christian newspapers, and local newspapers, who often highlighted artists from their local area who had submitted or sold work through the show, and visits and acquisitions by local education authorities and particular schools. Among the writers were John Berger who, as well as submitting paintings to Pictures for Schools, wrote praising the initiative in the New Statesman, and several articles by broadsheet art critic Eric Newton who I believe may have acted as an advisor to Directors of Education in local authorities. As well as previewing and publicising Pictures for Schools, and reiterating the organisers’ aims of improving children’s standards of taste and judgement by helping create a stimulating environment in schools, press coverage often made a lot of children’s selections of their favourite work in the show: each year, child visitors to Pictures for Schools were given questionnaires and asked to vote for their five favourite works of art in the exhibition (broken down into girls’ favourites, boys’ favourites and overall favourites), which were then shown in a special section of the exhibition the following year. Many press reports were concerned with the question of choosing artworks for children, and the success of the selection panel in maintaining a balance between artworks which did not go beyond children’s levels of visual and emotional understanding, and at the same time ensuring that artists did not patronise or ‘talk down’ to children in their style or subject matter. The general consensus was that Pictures for Schools accomplished this with a high level of success, with some critics even praisingPictures for Schools as one of the best group exhibitions and displays of contemporary modern art of the year. However, several writers expressed concerns that Pictures for Schools relied too much on social realism, and did not show much in the way of more challenging abstract art.

Depressingly, after 1966 the next batch of press cuttings date from the 1990s, and concern local and national press coverage of lost, stolen, damaged and misplaced artworks in schools and mismanagement of local authority and county art collections in places such as West Yorkshire and Leicestershire. Youngman estimated that 10 per cent of education authorities bought work through Pictures for Schools exhibitions, and snippets of information in the collection suggest that among these were: West Riding, Nottinghamshire, Hull, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, London County Council, Croydon, Manchester, Oxford City Education Committee, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Essex, Kent, West Sussex, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Worcestershire, City of Gloucester, Coventry, West Bromwich, Shropshire, Northumberland, Lancashire, Cumberland, Durham, Carlisle (and, in Wales, Glamorgan, Flintshire, Merthyr Tydfil and Monmouthshire, and in Scotland, Ross and Cromarty, Argyll, Sutherland, Banffshire, Midlothian, Fife, Edinburgh and Dunbartonshire). The Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire collections still exist in some form and are listed on the BBC’S Your Paintings website which catalogues all of the country’s publicly-owned oil paintings. But, online and through email at least, it is hard to find any reference let alone any information about any other local education authority or council art collections separate from gallery and museum collections, which begs the question: if these collections existed, what happened to them, where are they now and who is responsible for them?

I was also intrigued elsewhere in the collection by several typewritten scripts and references relating to television and radio broadcasts featuring Pictures for Schools, including a transcript of the BBC’s Observation Post from May 1947, presented by Richard Bennett and featuring art teacher Vera Rambaut discussing Pictures for Schools, Elizabeth Ayrton visiting Pictures for Schools for Woman’s Hour in February 1956, an unnamed TV script dating from around 1960 featuring Nan Youngman on Pictures for Schools, a 1960s transcript of The Critics covering a debate on Pictures for Schools which took place at Whitechapel Gallery between somebody (unnamed) Allen, Malcolm Muggeridge, Denis Mathews, Philip Hope Wallace, Dilys Powell and Peter De Francia, a BBC External Services production from 1964 hosted by Henry Swanzy and an appearance by Nan Youngman on the BBC’s regional news programme ‘Town and Around’ in 1965.

Another file related to Pictures for Welsh Schools, which took place at various venues across Wales, from libraries and colleges to the National of Museum of Wales, between 1951 and at least the late-1980s, and an attempt to initiate Pictures for Scottish Schools (in the event it appears that only one exhibition was held, in the mid-1960s). These items included exhibition catalogues, artists’ notes and preview invitations, and it was interesting to see the relationship between Nan Youngman and Pictures for Schools in England, and the versions of Pictures for Schools held in Wales and Scotland. Although Nan Youngman was involved in these exhibitions, including helping select artists and artworks, and there was crossover between artists represented in the London, Wales and Scotland exhibitions, they were administered more locally under the guidance of national art galleries in Scotland and Wales.

Correspondence between Nan Youngman and the Arts Council reveals that a selection of artworks from Pictures for Schools, too (generally easily-transportable paintings), toured following the London exhibitions to regional galleries in places such as Plymouth, Cirencester, Bolton, Keighley and Hull. Another minor but interesting piece of correspondence was a letter from a young girl at a school in London, who wrote to Nan Youngman following a class visit to Pictures for Schools expressing her enjoyment of the exhibition (the back page of the letter showed pencil drawings of her favourite artworks in the show).

I finally had chance to read an elusive dissertation by Nick Arnfield, written at the University of Manchester in 1985 at undergraduate or Master’s level and presented to the Department of Art Gallery and Museum Studies. Arnfield combined archival research (I recognised several of the items referred to in the dissertation, which are now in the Nan Youngman collection) with interviews with people involved with Pictures for Schools, including Nan Youngman and Eric Woodward from the Schools Museum Service in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Woodward is now 86, and I am going to meet with him tomorrow at the National Arts Education Archive at Yorkshire Sculpture Park where he volunteers one day a week). The dissertation was annotated with comments, presumably by Nan Youngman, where she agreed, disagreed or had additions to his observations about the scheme. Arnfield contextualised Pictures for Schools with a brief history of loan schemes for schools, including the nineteenth century museum loan services of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Liverpool Museum and Sheffield City Museum, and the establishment of county art collections, assisted by financial support from the Carnegie Trust from the 1930s. He concluded the dissertation with a section on the situation of art education in the mid-1980s, the survival, status, adaptation and use of collections such as those built up by local education authorities in the post-war period through Pictures for Schools, and economic and curricular pressures on schools which threatened the place of art in the school day. Arnfield took issue with the writing of Herbert Read, and his notions of artworks in schools as static objects which conferred benefits on the students through mere ‘osmosis’, focusing largely on the life and career of Nan Youngman and the links and networks of artists, educators and teachers Youngman built up around her which allowed Pictures for Schools to thrive for twenty-two years. Interestingly, despite much reference to Pictures for Schools in the Society for Education in Art’s journal Athene, and prominent references to the Society both on exhibition catalogues and in press reports, Arnfield suggests that the SEA always played a background role in the initiation, administration and development of the exhibitions, with Youngman driving the exhibitions from the start.

Among the most illuminating content in the collection was photographs of Pictures for Schools exhibitions, dating mostly from the early-1960s, which gave a glimpse into the selection and hanging process, as well as a sense of what the exhibitions were like for visitors and the variety of the work on show. Photographs of artworks ranged from the crisp, technically-accurate realism of Carel Weight’s 1963 Street Scene, the impressionistic landscape painting of Gilbert Mason andthe fluid motion of Jon Patterson’s 1964 oil painting Fairground Horses to the cartoon-like rockets in Bill Maynard’s 1966 painting the Planet, the rugged relief of John Addyman’s 1964 ceramic Rock Face, the organic, smooth-worn forms of Willi Soukop, the delicate embroideries of Eirian Short and the recognisable, serene figures and expressions of children cast in Betty Rea’s sculptures Standing Girl (1963) and After School (1966). Artworks are shown hung on top of each other in a crowded, slightly-old fashioned manner that reminded me of the way in which collections of historic, important artworks are shown off in the living rooms of country houses, but the photographs are brought to life by the appearance of children, who crowd around paintings in discussion and point at particular artworks or objects, appear to debate the meaning of more abstract, non-representational sculptures, turn their heads to try and get the best angle on unfamiliar forms, cluster in conversation and are captured with pen in mouth, questionnaires in hand and deep in concentration.

As Pictures for Schools exhibitions received funding from the Arts Council, I have been doing some reading about its history and development to understand some of the context of funding and state patronage in the post-war period. I have found some interesting things to bear in mind, for example how cultural experiences and official support for the arts was mediated by the choices and decisions of those in charge of the Arts Council, who were often seen to represent a fairly elite portion of metropolitan society. This also ties in with ideas of expertise, and the type of people who were seen as fit to serve on such bodies (usually those with an amateur rather than professional interest in art) and be consulted about the type of culture suitable for consumption by the modern British public. The information below was gleaned from two texts: ‘Cultured into Crisis: The Arts Council of Great Britain’ by Jonathan Harris, in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America (edited by Marcia Pointon), and Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain by Andrew Sinclair. It is amazing how two texts on the same topic can give such a different impression of a subject: Harris paints a critique of the Arts Council as a cautious and reactionary institution, whereas Sinclair details at great length a heroic organisation which is the envy of the rest of Europe.

The Arts Council of Great Britain was a major enabler for the arts in post-war Britain. Its formation in 1945 as a quango under Royal Charter from the monarch, at the same time as the welfare state was being set up, indicated that art was considered worthy of receiving public funding along with essential social benefits such health service and housing. Set up with the purpose of developing a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts and improving the standard of their execution, the Arts Council grew out of a growing realisation during the Second World War that Britain had a national culture which was worth defending. The Arts Council also took on an advisory role, working with government departments, local authorities and other bodies. It was structured around committees comprising a mixture of professional administrators and private individuals with amateur or informal interests in the arts. As these people were not paid, this tended to favour those who could afford to work without a salary, leading to accusations of a socially homogenous organisation with members drawn from a relatively narrow section of society; officers and advisors were mostly based in the South East, close to the Arts Council’s location in London. As the government also chose the chairman and all other members, this led to further accusations of members being broadly supportive of the government’s political and ideological principles and policies, and a lack of transparency in decision-making.

Other criticisms levelled at the Arts Council included a lack of definition of the ‘fine arts’, and that the Council has tended to represent a certain type of media and practitioners over others. For instance, visual arts have always received a small amount of funding compared with drama, music and literature. Supporting only professional cultural activities, the Arts Council started by aiding the best that had already developed in the metropolis and the regions (Sinclair) rather than nurturing new talent. At first, a large part of the Arts Council’s work involved managing its own touring exhibitions, with large grants made to around 15 prestigious galleries, mainly in metropolitan areas such as London, which could be seen to share its values and standards. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of regional organisations comprising amalgamations of local government bodies, specialised arts clubs and other associations of people with interests in a wide variety of cultural activities were established and began to seek funding from the Arts Council. They were later officially recognised as Regional Arts Associations.

One thing I found it hard to get a sense of was the Regional Arts Associations which formed later in the post-war period: what type of people were involved in these Regional Arts Societies, how they operated, and the kinds of activities they supported at a local level. Gaining more understanding of how this network of regional arts bodies operated could be relevant as my project will look at Pictures for Schools on two levels: how it operated centrally, through annual exhibitions in London anchored in the Society for Education in Art, and on a local level, in geographically-distributed local authorities and schools. So far, I believe that local authorities in a few key areas – chiefly Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire – built up particularly strong collections of council-owned artworks, with some of the artworks purchased through Pictures for Schools, and I am interested in seeing whether there were any links with and support from Regional Arts Associations.

I first became aware of Dawn Pereira’s research into twentieth century public art a couple of years ago when I became a fan of the prolific architectural sculptor William Mitchell, and came across a paper Pereira wrote on his ‘concrete legacy‘ (later, I also saw Pereira deliver a paper at the Decorated School’s one-day seminar in Leeds). Pereira’s article opened my eyes to this area of art and social history as a rich field for research, and made me think I would like to do some research in a similar vein in the future, combining my interest in how artists such as Mitchell developed new uses for materials and utilised decorative textures in otherwise ordinary public places to great effect, and the perceived social benefits of such work. I later had the opportunity to visit William Mitchell and interview him at his home in London, where he proudly showed me a bound copy of a thesis Pereira completed at the University of East London in 2008, entitled Art for the ‘common man’: the role of the artist within the London County Council 1957-1965, which focuses for a large part on Mitchell and Antony Hollaway’s employment as design consultants for the London County Council in the post-war era, working on innovative large-scale artworks for public building projects such as schools and housing developments. Through my interest in Mitchell’s work I came across Joe Austin, a fellow blogger with an interest in the period and love of Mitchell’s art, and he too got in contact with Pereira, asking for the opportunity to read her thesis electronically. Austin was kind enough to break Pereira’s thesis down into chapters and share it with me over the internet. I had never read a PhD thesis before, but found Pereira’s thesis to be very readable and accessible, making great use of archive sources from the London Metropolitan Archive, in addition to interviews with Mitchell and others, as well as documenting the state of artworks commissioned by the LCC today, which have often neglected and fallen into a disrepair or have disappeared altogether.

Whilst there are clear differences between Pereira’s area of research and my own – Pereira is looking at the commissioning of artworks in a geographically defined area, within a relatively narrow timeframe – there was much of interest as a backdrop to my research (indeed, Pictures for Schools gets a mention near the start, and several of the artists commissioned by the LCC – including Karin Jonzen, Sir John Verney, Willi Soukop and John W MIlls, detailed in a useful ‘biography’ section at the end, are names that are familiar to me from their inclusion in late-1960s Pictures for Schools exhibition catalogues!).

Of particular interest are the links Pereira outlines between the Arts Council, which was set up in the post-war period, and art commissioning schemes such as that run by the London County Council. The LCC, Pereira suggests, had money to spend on art but not necessarily knowledge about which artists and artworks were suitable, allowing the Arts Council, which had expertise but lacked funding, to adopt a consultancy role.

Pereira’s thesis also touches on how art commissioning schemes, and commitment to dedicating part of a local council’s budget to art, were taken up in areas such as Hertfordshire and Leicestershire and promoted by the ‘single vision’ of Directors of Education such as John Newsom and Stewart Mason. Leicestershire in particular was willing to take risks by purchasing artworks by relatively unknown artists, but also purchased work from established London galleries such as Redfern and Piccadilly. One of the things I will need to bear in mind during my research is the relationship and differences between works acquired through exhibitions such as Pictures for Schools, works acquired directly from artists or galleries, and commissioned, site-specific artworks for schools, and their relative prevalence and status in county council collections. The Pictures for Schools catalogues I have indicate that the Pictures for Schools exhibitions worked as a way of introducing schools and local education authorities to artists and their typical styles and subject matters, who could then be commissioned to make further, site-specific works if required.

Pereira suggests that animal and family themes were popular subject matters among artists working in schools at that time, although other artists embraced abstract painting and sculpture. One of the areas of Pictures for Schools I am potentially interested in exploring further in relation to ideas about Britishness is the nationality of the artists who contributed work to the scheme, as several of them arrived in Britain as refugees having to flee their own countries. Pereira suggests that community-based themes were common among these émigré artists.

I also picked up on a few books which may be useful for my project, including writing on the public art of the period by Margaret Garlake.

One project which aimed to embed art in schools in the post-war period was the School Prints scheme, which was started in 1946 under the direction of Brenda Rawnsley, who built upon a company started by her late husband Derek Rawnsley which rented reproductions of famous artworks to both state and private schools with accompanying notes. Artists were invited to submit sketches for School Prints, and successful submissions were reproduced in return for a fee and ongoing royalties. Subscribers to School Prints received four lithograph prints per term, or twelve per year, and prints were also available to the public at a slightly higher price. Like many attempts to expose schoolchildren to art, School Prints relied upon the enthusiasm and dedication of an individual: Brenda Rawnsley, whom Ruth Artmonsky portrays in her history of the scheme as a “feisty, energetic, enthusiastic woman finding her way in the post-war art world” (Artmonsky, 2010). Artmonsky places School Prints within a zeitgeist of bringing ‘good’ art to the people, and educating people’s ‘aesthetic discernment’. Like other attempts to take original artworks into schools, the School Prints scheme was guided by a committee of ‘experts’, the Art Advisory Council, which included Herbert Read and Nan Youngman as well as a representative from the Arts Council, a child psychologist, the Chief Art Inspector to the London County Council, Audrey Martin, Art advisor for Hertfordshire and Alex Barclay-Russell, art master at Charterhouse.

However, there are clear differences between the School Prints project and Pictures for Schools. Unlike Pictures for Schools, which encompassed a variety of art forms, artworks were confined to lithographs, and there was ongoing uncertainty on the part of Rawnsley about the extent to which artworks reproduced in editions in the thousands could be sold as original artworks. Unlike Pictures for Schools, School Prints was aimed solely at primary schools. School Prints met with limited success as, although Artmonsky characterises the artists involved as being largely ‘parochial and conventional’, the artworks and their subject matters were nevertheless found to be too ‘novel and advanced’ for schools, and the project extended only to three series of prints; a later scheme, initiated by Rawnsley in the 1950s, which involved selling schools moulds of artists’ sculptures through the Victoria and Albert Museum, which they could reproduce themselves, was similarly a commercial failure. Whereas Pictures for Schools often featured the work of young artists and recent graduates, School Prints invited contributions from more established artists, several of whom had been part of the state-sponsored ‘Recording Britain’ scheme in wartime – this type of subject matter was considered suitable for children. Finally, the scope of School Prints was not geographically limited to schools in England and Wales as with Pictures for Schools, nor featured solely British artists, as Pictures for Schools did: Rawnsley aimed to eventually extend the project to the countries across the Empire, as well as the United States, and prints were sold as far away as Antigua, South Africa, Kenya and India. Furthermore, the final instalment of School Prints featured the work of famous European artists such as Picasso who were reaching the end of their careers (Artmonsky, 2010).

School Prints followed on from earlier schemes to introduce original artworks to schools in the form of prints, such as prints given to schools as part of a series produced by the Post Office. Another print series for educational establishments, Contemporary Lithographs, ran between 1937 and 1938 and aimed to sensitise students to really looking at pictures and inspire their own creativity, in line with contemporary ideas that people had an innate desire to learn and respond if they were given the opportunity. Contemporary Lithographs focused on original prints by living artists, working on the assumption that good pictures did not always belong in museums, and considering prints to be better value for schools than watercolours and oil paintings. Its unique selling points were ‘quality, accessibility and originality’. However, like other schemes for aesthetic education, the public and schools often did not share the taste of those behind Contemporary Lithographs and found the abstract and non-representational artwork included in the scheme challenging (Artmonsky, 2010).